The Verdict

The official announcement came today, and as expected it was "Satisfactory".

The reasons:

1. Just under half of our students achieve above what's expected of them, and in order to get the next grade up ("Good") it must be 50% or more. I shudder to think what the percentage is for an "Outstanding"! So doing what's expected is no longer good enough is all I can gather from that. We, as teachers, are given targets for each child, which are invariably high in the first place - some are even A*. If the targets are challenging in the first place, you are always going to struggle, and if the target was A* in the first place, then you're stuffed.
2. Although we had loads of "Outstanding" lessons apparently, we also had quite a few "Satisfactory" too. Does that not average out at a "Good"? Call me logical/naive, but there you go.
3. We have to use more data (yes, more, if there can possibly be any more to use) in our planning. The mind boggles a little at this point as we are essentially drowning in the stuff now.

They were the main points as far as I remember, although there may have been more (I switched off to be honest). This meant that, due to there being too many lessons that weren't "Good" or "Outstanding", that makes the management "Satisfactory", which I suppose is fair. The implication was that if the teachers who were below "Good" sorted themselves out, then that would sort out the management grade of "Satisfactory". An organisation being run from the bottom up - interesting concept.

We'll see - the leadership team are having a day off soon to formulate a plan of action, and we are likely to get a monitoring visit in a year or so, which will be fun. Essentially the minds of the inspectors is made up before they arrive, from the data they receive on the school.

All-in-all a thoroughly demoralising experience, but I think that's what they set out to do for the reasons given in previous posts. Worth every penny of that £200 million per year, I'm sure you'd agree.